Founders at Work.pdf

Preface
It’s been more than a year since Founders at Work was first published. What
have I learned since?
The biggest surprise has been the sheer number of people interested in
startups. I know about the ones who apply to Y Combinator, read Hacker News,
or attend Startup School, but I could never be sure how many people were
interested in startups beyond that core of would-be founders. A lot, it turns out.
I get emails and see blog posts about Founders at Work on an almost daily basis.
Some people finally took the plunge and started a startup, some learned that it
was all right to change their idea, some were able to face a new day even though
their company seemed doomed. And some just had a better understanding of
the people they knew who worked at startups.
I wrote in the Introduction that my biggest hope for the book was that it
would inspire people to start their own startups, by showing how uncertain
successful founders were themselves at first. And that seems to be happening.
My favorite email came from a programmer who quit his job at a big company
to become the first employee at a startup. The founders had been working for a
while to convince him to join the company. “I quit my job the day after I
finished reading Founders at Work,” he said in an email. “Without your book, I
may not have had the courage to.”
As a first-time author, I was also surprised at how fast word about the book
spread on the Internet. I was very fortunate to have several famous bloggers
write about the book, and each time we saw an immediate spike in sales. This is
the proverbial “level playing field,” and this same phenomenon is what makes a
lot of web startups possible.
Since the book was published, Y Combinator has funded a lot more startups.
We’ve now funded more than 100. Has this changed my opinion about
what makes a startup succeed? In a few details, perhaps yes. But in general, it’s
only confirmed the things I’ve learned from doing these interviews. I don’t
think I’d change anything about the themes I originally wrote about in the
Introduction: determination is the most important quality in a founder,
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